Sunday, November 23, 2008

Elections are the best means available for businessmen and their political valets to divert the working class from its historical task - the emancipation of all humanity. An artificial terrain where your X legitimizes capitalist power, be it Charest, Marois, David, Dumont, whoever...

The diversion of the working class towards bourgeois democracy for the last 100 years has led to its passivity and defeat. The "citizens" - as politicians and unionists like to call them, in order play down theexistence of the working class - are locked in a Kafkaesque choice between political parties which offer no choice at all when it comes to ideas - obsessed only with grabbing governmental power.

All of this at a time when the crisis exposes the reality of capitalism to a degree greater than ever before: environmental problems, the impossibility of sustainable development in the unbridled race for profit, which only represents the capitalist system's apex; unemployment and growing pauperization; the use of "terrorism" to stifle any critical opposition to the economic and political order, and nationalist polarizations towards world conflict.

To abstain is to refuse bourgeois power, to deny its legitimacy; it's the refusal of the daily extortion of surplus-value from the working class.

Workers, we must realize that elections do not change anything.

Blackmail in the form of closures like Olymel will continue. Unions, which cry out that we need "to act together for Quebec", prod us continually to vote for various clones. The true decision-makers are not the deputies; they are the businessmen and businesswomen, the companies of the state's senior officials - basically all the owners of the means production who are in charge of enterprises such as Bombardier, Québecor, Olymel, Hydro-Québec, or a possible Eole Inc. Their goal is the pursuit of profits for their stockholders and leaders. Among them, we count the official managers of state enterprises, those same state enterprises that operate symbiotically with their private sector sisters. For example, thesupply of electricity at reasonable costs to the SME or other monopolies, be it Hydro-Québec or a possible Eole inc., is one of close collaboration between Québec's state capitalism and private capital. From the CSN sidestepping Quebec Solidaire for the Greens, this political "rearguard" wants nothing more than to improve "the economy of Quebec" to benefit the corporations, and to create increasingly precarious jobs…This gang of social-climbers will never admit that in the capitalist economy, employment is only temporary and that wage-cuts are increasingly permanent. Faced with the disillusionment that Capital creates, their solution isn't to bring it down but to prolong its existence, its so-called democracy, its extortion of our class'slabour. Their aim is to get us to vote in the belief that capitalismis eternal, and that we must make do with it!

To abstain will not suffice.

The increase in abstention during elections reveals the growing indifference of workers to the electoral process. However, this alone will never be sufficient. Let us stop begging at the altar of the bourgeois state with petitions, votes, or on marches of the "Francoise David" variety. The dictatorship of the bourgeoisie must be destroyed and replaced by the dictatorship of workers councils. It's the prospect of the class war against our exploiters that must motivate us. Workers, we must unite to construct an internationalist proletarian party, an anti-Stalinist party!

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